It's taken me two days to be able to talk about it.
On Tuesday, I had my first annual breast MRI. Apparently, women treated with radiation for Hodgkin's lymphoma before age 30 just earned a position on the ACS's high-risk-for-breast-cancer list, and they just changed their recommendations for that category of women to include an annual breast MRI in addition to an annual mammogram. At least for women younger than 40; our breast tissue is dense, and mammograms are missing early cancers in high-risk younger women. So after a fight with my insurance company, my new radiation oncologist set me up for this lovely exam.
I had one MRI years ago. A few months after I finished cancer treatment, I had a migraine that lasted for two weeks, so I had a head MRI to rule out the unthinkable. I am claustrophobic, but that MRI wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. I could see the technicians through the mirror they had placed over the machine and a fan blew on me, so I didn't feel closed in or trapped. I think I actually fell asleep in there. I figured the breast MRI would be just as painless.
Ooh, boy. It su-ucked.
What I didn't expect was that they have to lay you face-down and drop your boobies through two holes on the sliding table that bring to mind two-holer outhouses (yes, I'm originally from the country.) In an effort to make me comfortable (as if such a thing is possible in a face-down position in an MRI machine) the techs put a pillow under my face. Problem was, it was a very soft pillow that my face gradually sunk into, leaving no space under my nose. I breathed through a pillow for 30 minutes. They told me I could turn my head to the side, but because the MRI machine curves, the pillow curved up around my head and pressed the pillow even tighter against my nose.
I didn't start feeling the suffocation until the test had begun and I was reminded to keep as still as possible. It was too late to ask someone to readjust the pillow. Right before the test started, I had already had to call the techs in to turn the fan on higher; I couldn't feel any air on my head, and it was wigging me out to the verge of a panic attack. Then when the fan did come on high, it blew my hair all over the small portion of my face that was free from the pillow and tickled the upper part of my nose while my hands were pinned at my sides and under my thighs, useless to scratch. It was unbelievably miserable.
As the machine roared to life, I had my face upturned with only my chin touching the pillow. When my head started sinking into the pillow and I realized I was going to have to breathe through it, I tried to keep my head up higher. I was able to do this for about 10 minutes before my neck muscles started to cramp up and get too tired. I let my head sink down and just kept telling myself that the fan blowing on me would give me enough air and to try to keep calm. The test lasted a total of 40 minutes.
Add to this the problem that they can't fit the headphones in when people are laying face-down. I heard and felt every bit of the clanking, popping, and roaring the machine makes. They could fit earlpugs in, and I suppose this helped some, but it was scary and near-deafening at times.
Just when I was thinking there was no way I could go on, a voice came into the tube telling me I was doing great and that there were only 4 minutes left. I concentrated on holding my suffocated and cramped body still just a few more minutes while the test finished up.
I was never so happy to be rolled out of a test in my entire life. With my medical past, I've been through it all; more full-body CT scans than I can count, annual PET scans, biopsies, pokings and proddings. But nothing has ever been like this.
When I do this again next year, they are sooooo sedating me.
And shoving the pillow up their arses.
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